Monthly Archives: February 2014

March is roaring in like a lion, lending itself as the theme for the latest edition of the Health Wonk Review hosted by David Harlow of the HealthBlawg. I know I say it every time, but this one’s really good, and you should read it!

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If you follow your local healthcare marketplace even superficially you have probably noticed that everybody is merging with everybody else. Hospitals, physician groups, and even insurance providers are combining themselves in various ways, ostensibly for the purposes of either making money or helping people, or both. The Affordable Care Act has had something to do with this by agreeing to pay these groups in specific ways, depending on a set of performance measures. There are three broad categories of such groups: Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), Group Practice Reporting Option (GPRO), and Accountable Care Organization (ACO).

ACO’s in particular have gotten a lot of attention because the payment system rewards cost-savings and makes the group pay for cost overruns. For example, medicare will pay $X to ACO Y for all their medicare patients. If the total cost for care of all the medicare patients in ACO Y is lower than $X, the members of the ACO keep the change. If the total cost is higher, the members lose money. In order to prevent wily hospital CEO’s from skimping on care and pocketing the dollars, 33 performance measures are followed to ensure care is adequate. Forgive me if all of this is review. I’m getting to my point.

Last Friday the government released performance numbers for five of these measures for 141 ACOs in 2012. The five they chose were, essentially, the easiest to understand and the least controversial. Four deal with diabetes and one with vascular disease. Here are the measures:

1. Controlling blood sugar levels in patients with diabetes

2. Controlling blood pressure in patients with diabetes

3. Ensuring that patients with diabetes do not smoke

4. Prescribing aspirin to patients with diabetes

5. Use of angiotensin-converting inhibitors (ACE-I) or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARB) in patients with diabetes and weakened left ventricles.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, ACO’s accomplished these 5 measures satisfactorily 65-75% of the time. OK, not bad. The groups varied widely, however, from 9% on some measures to 97%. The other two types of group payment systems, PQRS and GPRO, did a little better. I’ve been searching around but I can’t find any data on how all individual groups within the ACOs did on these measures before they joined the ACO. That would be nice to know.

The thing is, I’m not sure why consumers need this information, at least on an individual basis. You see, patients don’t choose a specific ACO. Chances are you are in one and you don’t even know. You can’t shop around for an ACO, or a PQRS, or a GPRO. You the patient don’t know how your personal doctor fares on these metrics. What is important to know is how your doctor is getting paid, or not. It’s important because, if you look at those quality measures above, you notice that one of them is a personal behavior that has little to do with your doctor (smoking), and two others require significant patient cooperation (controlling blood sugar and blood pressure). So, in very real way, the behavior of you the patient determines how much the doctor gets paid. Imagine if a group of, say, plumbers got together and persuaded 5,000 customers to pool their money and pay them a set rate for any plumbing problems that occurred in a given year. Say 100 or so of those customers hate all plumbers. Or are just really irresponsible. Those people could, with their behavior (clogging drains, putting hair in the toilet, letting the pipes freeze, etc.), decrease the pay for all the plumbers in the group. Plumbers are smarter than doctors and would never put up with pay being dependent on someone else’s behavior. That’s what your doctor faces. Just so you know.

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Most people, regardless of their political leaning, can agree that the market for health care in the United States isn’t really working well. Take one step further, though, and disagreement rapidly ensues. On the left, the common understanding is that a market failure has occurred, and that the proper thing to do is have government intervene to correct that failure–usually by expanding public insurance programs, subsidizing private insurance, and the like. On the right, the common understanding is that the market hasn’t exactly failed, but that it could certainly be improved if we got government out of the way, stopped insulating people from the costs of their care, and made consumers better informed. In other words, take care of the information asymmetry that exists in health care, and the market will right itself.

There are some obvious limitations to health care markets. For example, even with perfect information, someone with a heart attack is highly unlikely to comparison shop for the best doctor or hospital in their area. Yet, just as it’s hard to disagree that the market isn’t working well, it’s hard to argue that there isn’t a problem with information on health care prices and quality that a consumer needs to make rational choices. Moreover, while it won’t solve all of our problems, I do think that increasing people’s access to information about health care prices and quality could help to bring some of our market inefficiencies under control. But the real question is: can transparency in health care happen in the United States?

Across the country, eleven states have indicated that they believe it can, by attempting to increase pricing transparency for health care procedures. The rationale is simple: Tell people what different things cost, and they’ll more likely opt for lower-cost providers, which will lead to an overall reduction in costs as providers begin competing with one another on the basis of price. There are a few problems with this, though. First, it requires a pretty sizable data collection effort. For instance, Colorado has begun work on an all-payers claims database. Second, interpreting the cost data can be a challenge, because the out-of-pocket cost someone pays is largely a factor of their insurance coverage. In other words, if you have excellent coverage, you probably care little about how much your provider charges, and more about what you actually pay. And, finally, we humans can make the mistake that higher priced goods and services must inherently be better goods and services. After all, you get what you pay for, as the saying goes.

Of course, we know that’s not always true. But in health care, measuring quality can also be a rather elusive goal. Sure, we can capture process measures for recommend treatments like administering a beta blocker to a heart attack patient, but is that really what consumers care about? On some level, yes, but they also care about how nice the waiting room is, and how the staff and the providers treat them. We have things like Google Reviews and Yelp for consumer reviews of hotels, restaurants, and other businesses. And, in fact, there are numerous sites out there for reviewing medical providers. The question is: Are they useful?

A recent survey study, just published in JAMA finds that people aren’t really engaged with these sites the way they are with others. In fact, just 5% of respondents indicated that they had reviewed their own provider online, 23% of respondents reported using such reviews when selecting a primary care provider, and only 19% considered the reviews to be very important in their decision. Of course, these types of reviews are only part of ascertaining provider quality, but their limited use raises the issue of whether other efforts at transparency will be more effective. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for you, but I’d be extremely curious to hear what you think as an existing or potential consumer of health care.

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With the release of their new HeartAssist5 heart pump, ReliantHeart is making real-time, personalized feedback possible for the millions of Americans suffering from heart failure. The new technology allows for real-time, remote monitoring of implantable devices, years of added life for patients, and flexibility to travel without a physician nearby. With a staggering projected 46% growth in heart failure by 2030, advances in heart failure innovation are on the forefront of changing medical treatment, policy, device research and physician reimbursements. Further, with heart failure and disease disproportionately affecting minorities in the US, advances in length and quality of life could be huge strides for medical equality.

Heart Failure In America

Approximately 7.5 million people in the United States currently suffer from heart failure, a figure that is increasing over time as more people survive heart attacks and various other heart conditions. According to the Heart Failure Society of America, an estimated 400,000 to 700,000 new cases of heart failure are diagnosed each year, with deaths averaging 250,000 annually, more than double since 1979. Even worse, an estimated one half of heart failure patients die within five years of diagnosis and 20% within the first year.

With a waiting list for heart transplants at an overwhelming 3,736 at publication, and less than 2,500 hearts donated annually, the need for a bridge between heart failure and transplant is literally life and death.

LVADs

Left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) are implantable heart pumps that were created to temporarily support patients with advanced heart failure as the bridge between diagnoses and transplant. However, with new scientific advancements, LVADs are becoming a long-term tool for improving heart function without transplant.

The right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs, but the left ventricle is responsible for pumping blood to the rest of the entire body, making it much more susceptible to failure. Therefore, LVADs have been the focus of most modern research to prolong and improve life saving implants.

Patient-Centered Care

Reliant’s system acts like your car’s dashboard. “If a patient’s pump has any sign of a challenge, like dehydration or low flow, the remote monitoring system signals the change to a data-collection center that notifies the transplant center as well as the individual,” ReliantHeart CEO Rodger Ford says. This is what makes the HeartAssist5 unique; at the first sign of a problem the right people are notified immediately.

Essentially, if the engine light goes on, the heart center and patient are notified to get the engine checked.

He also notes that the patients can set monitors to send text message notifications, thus making changes in blood flow, speed and power truly personalized. Individual blood flow is collected and transmitted every 5 minutes, making one’s own body the standard comparator.

The greatest importance to Founder and CTO Bryan Lynch is his ability to use his background as an engineer to, “Get involved in a project where you can actually see how you saved a life. While the docs and nurses are the real lifesavers, we give them the tool to make it possible.” He continues that it is vitally important for engineers and innovators to gain a patient-centered approach to get a real reduction in cost burden and improve quality of life.

Sailesh Saxena, CFO, continues highlighting the patient focus of the company by telling about the origination of the design of the VAD pack. “Bryan and I used to go to Schlotsky’s Deli ($BUNZ) for lunch,” he said, “and we used to see this man wearing a coat although it wasn’t cold out. Bryan noticed immediately that he was attempting to hide an LVAD controller and batteries. Well, this happened more than once, and we recognized that he was always concealing the VAD controller. So we decided that we needed to create a unique insert so that our LVAD control system could slip right into a Louis Vuitton ($LVMH) or Gucci ($GUC) bag unnoticed. It’s the small things that make the patient feel like we understand what they really want.”

Expanding The Geography Of Care

Remote monitoring, like other methods of telemedicine, is a key to expanding the geography of health care. “As technology matures, with the help of remote monitoring, the cardiologist and patient will feel safer with greater distances between them,” says Saxena.

This growth in telemedicine as a whole, and specifically in heart care, has major implications for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as health care policy and reform. Because CMS is beginning to assign reimbursements and penalties based on patient outcomes instead of traditional fee-for-service metrics, it will become more and more important to have reimbursements reflect remote monitoring and its likely benefits.

Reimbursement codes also need to be reworked to genuinely target geographic discrepancies in care, which are fundamentally important for transplant centers. However, at present, CMS is slowly beginning to take growth rates of heart implants seriously based on the agency’s continued increases in payments, including their slight variations in geographic differences.

An Engineering Feat

In a recent study, researchers found that platelets flowing through the HeartAssist5 are exposed to significantly lower cumulative shear stress levels than in competitive devices tested. Ultimately, this means that the ReliantHeart product allows for what the CTO calls “a more physiologically normal cardiac output, including the pulse.”

What Bryan means is that people with failing hearts have low blood flow throughout the body, which is why they are so sick. When an LVAD is implanted, patients return to a more normal flow, but they also need blood flow that is as natural as possible. With the HeartAssist5, blood is not damaged and any pulse that the recovering heart produces is naturally transmitted to the body.

The LVAD and heart now work together to help the patient recover.

Although there are two other continuous flow LVADs on the market (THOR and HTRW), the ReliantHeart team claims their careful design capitalizes on working with the natural ventricle to the benefit of the patient, almost like a gym trainer for your heart.

Their “implantable flow probe” is also a revolutionary aspect of the HeartAssist5. This ultrasonic probe measures the blood flow from the LVAD in real-time providing critical feedback that is a one-of-a-kind technology providing data that makes the aforementioned remote monitoring so valuable. Ford says this ability to see patient-specific trends remotely in real time not only helps all patients improve quality of life, but the longevity of the HeartAssist5 creates a life support system, far beyond the “bridge” that the LVAD was originally created to be.

So this month, for American Heart Month, think about what innovation really is. It might be the ability to prolong and add quality of life for individuals and families across the nation, to share more time with loved ones.

If you ever get access to the inner sanctum of a doctor’s office, besides the dirty scrubs on the floor, the shaving kit on the windowsill, and the remains of Chinese take-out from last week perched on top of the printer, you might notice a rank of post-it’s on a wall somewhere with a bewildering array of numbers and dots. It’s always post-its or some other disposable but never-disposed-of scrap paper tacked to the walls. Those numbers are the diseases your doctors most commonly sees. In numeric form. These are called ICD-9 codes. They allow all billing, essentially. If what you have doesn’t have an ICD-9 code, you aren’t sick, you’re imagining it, go away, no one is going to get paid to see you.

Here’s something I came across while poking around at Health Wonk Review, which will be hosted, by the way, by our own Brad Wright on March 13th. Did you know that this October we’ll be getting a new ICD? No, not an implantable cardiac defibrillator, though some of us may need one of those after we see the size of the Tenth Edition of the International Classification of Diseases. Sarah Kliff, a blogger for the Washington Post, tells us that while ICD-9 had 14,000 codes, ICD-10 has 68,000. So, that’s better. It’s more, you know, numbers.

One of the reasons for the new edition, and the one proponents will tout, is actually a good one. The ICD-9 can’t expand anymore. There are no more qualifiers you can add to, say, Pneumonia NOS (not otherwise specified). The basic diseases have generally been divided by research and innovation into sub-categories based on new microscopic findings, genetic testing, etc. So it’s more specific. It’s also going to be great for moldy researchers and poverty-stricken grad students. Data-mining will be much more fun and informative. You can look up, for instance, how many doctors billed for the ICD-10 code “bitten by large turkey” presumably with a modifier if it was a wild turkey.

We doctors are understandably wary of this new edition, and not just because we’ll have to get bigger offices to accommodate all the post-its we’ll have to add to the walls. You see, it’s generally the doctor who generates the code, at least initially. So it’s more work for us. Nothing new there. Most new policies and procedures produce more work for doctors and, even more often, for nurses. But the work increase is greatest for the medical coders. The US has over 186,000 medical coders. That’s 186,000 people who work in the medical field doing absolutely nothing that has anything to do with the actual care of people. Looks like there will be more soon. Wonderful job opportunities out there college graduates!

The AMA, which is of course against implementation of ICD-10, estimates it could cost $50,000 to $8 million dollars for doctors offices to transition, and it would cost a lot of time as the billers would have to slow down until they learned the new codes. Plus there will be more coders. So, not cheap. Now, a major RAND Corporation study in 2004 estimated the potential benefits of switching to ICD-10 outweighed the costs by as much as $4.5 billion. But isn’t it the RAND corp people who said EMR was going to save the health care industry so much money?

So the new ICD codes are not money-saving. They’re not time-saving. They make zero impact on patient care, either in quality or in quantity. They do have the advantage of being more specific and generating better tracking and research data. But what is the mantra for healthcare reform? “Lower Cost, Higher Quality”?

A global study was released at the new year by the Intel Corporation indicating that around the world people’s health care wants and needs are principally focused on technology and personalization. The “Intel Health Innovation Barometer” found a consistent theme: customized care. At the intersection of health, care and technology, communities around the world consistently said they wanted to see their biological makeup and individual behaviors used to make receiving care more effective and efficient. This unsurprisingly was described by people through means such as telehealth, mobile health and the sharing of health information in real time. However, surprising methods of care were also common themes throughout the world such as ingestible monitoring systems and care that involves no utilization of hospitals.

Eric Dishman, Intel Fellow and Global General Manager of Health & Life Sciences at the company says the findings indicate that, “workflow, policy and culturally focused care are the most important ways we can improve health care.” Making care convenient, universally available and efficient through technological innovation is seen as more promising around the world than increasing the number of physicians or funding more academic research.

According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), “People always talk about disruptors in terms of various kinds of practices in the American economy,” but “there’s nobody who’s done more disruption for the right reason than Eric Dishman.” With that kind of support to understand and advance the health care system, the Intel Health Innovation Barometer was conducted online by Penn Schoen Berland in Brazil, China, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan and the United States. It was conducted among a representative sample of 12,000 adults aged 18 and older with a margin of error of +/- 0.89 percentage points.

Surprising Findings:

– Traditional hospitals, according to 57% of people, will be obsolete in the future

– Majority of people (84%) would be willing to share their personal health information to advance and lower costs in the health care system

– More than 70% of people are receptive to using toilet sensors, prescription bottle sensors and swallowed health monitors

– 72% of those surveyed would be willing to see a doctor via video conference for non-urgent appointments

– 66% of people say they would prefer a care regimen that is designed specifically for them based on their genetic profile or biology

– More than half of people (53%) would trust a test they personally administered as much or more than if that same test was performed by a doctor

– About 30% of people would trust themselves to perform their own ultrasound

While wearable monitoring devices are commonly accepted in the US, global readiness for ingestible and sensory systems far exceeds that of Americans. Acceptance of non-hospital care is also more appealing to those living outside the US. In remote areas of India, for example, extremely high percentages of people said that there is no need for traditional hospitalization.

Although in the US, a growing desire to care for the elderly at home gives hope to Eric Dishman that there could soon come a day that hospitals are obsolete. He cites changes in care seeking behaviors, policy and payment reform as incentives to move away from traditional hospitalization care. “The moment you signal pay for performance, people start thinking about how we misuse hospitals every single day,” says Dishman. That misuse of hospitalizations, and lack of formal hospitals in other countries, contributes greatly to the number of individuals worldwide who think the archaic system is not sustainable in the future.

Emerging Technologies For Innovation

Intel has been doing qualitative and quantitative research around the health care industry for many years. To date, the Intel Barometer is the most extensive survey it has conducted, and did reveal shifts in people’s increased desire to have access to emerging personal technology tools to become more active members of their care team.

Specifically, the Intel R&D teams are using ideology like Dishman’s to seek clarity and recognition of health advancements that unburden people from having to travel to a health care provider. “Care must occur at the home as the default model,” says Dishman. “It was also interesting,” he says of the survey, “to see people in emerging markets such as Brazil, China and India trusted themselves to use health monitoring technologies more than those in more technologically advanced economies like Japan and the United States.

Intel’s team of ethnographers used research in more than 1,000 homes and more than 250 hospitals across 20 countries to better understand the everyday lives of people, including those receiving and giving care.

The technologies that Intel’s survey received novel feedback on include items such as wearable and ingestible monitoring systems. While these hi-tech possibilities are new to all markets, the potential benefits could be felt across the entire health care arena as more thorough and patient-centered data is collected, driven by patient approval and demand.

Eric Dishman’s Personal Mission

In his pursuit of better health care technologies and home health care, Eric Dishman has been driven primarily from his in depth involvement with the health care system. As a student at the University of North Carolina, Dishman was told that he had months to live due to a rare kidney disease. Over twenty years later he has received a new kidney from a colleague at Intel thanks to sequencing his genes and finding that his diagnosis had been wrong his entire life.

Further, his grandmother’s progression of Alzheimer’s Disease drove his pursuit of innovation to keep her safe in her own home. He found that keeping her health and dignity was a group effort. According to him, “Improving health care is a team effort, including patients and their families. Intel’s research shows that when people see benefits for them and their wider community, they are open to sharing sensitive information in an anonymous way.”

His approach seems to be gaining support based on the Health Innovation Barometer, which found that a higher percentage of people (47%) were willing to share their personal health records than their phone records (38%) or banking records (30%) to aid innovation.

If Dishman and Intel have their way, the new survey will move them to the head of the class by proving to health care leaders around the globe that massive disruption to the health care system is possible and supported by the large community. Smart devices that can connect patients and care givers in their home can lead to all kinds of health and policy change. Payment reform, independence and equal access might all be possible in the near future if individuals around the world are willing to use their own bodies and surroundings to educate and innovate the larger system.

Steve Anderson of HealthInsurance.org hosts the latest edition of the Health Wonk Review. Steve’s gone with a Valentine’s Day–Be Mine edition. Love and health policy are in the air, folks! Check it out here.